Pelican Parts Forums - Sully/60 Minute Interview

Why Sully may be the last of his kind

By*Robert Kolker*
Published Feb 1, 2009

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1234231046.jpg
Sully, as an Air Force Academy cadet, in 1973. *(Photo: USAF Academy/AP)

Modern piloting is built on routines. Hundreds of millions of man-hours have been poured into analyzing every possible eventuality, stripping it of risk and mapping out what to do on the rare occasion when something does go wrong. On the afternoon of January 15, Chesley B. Sullenberger III was following the routine. He reported for work at La Guardia at the appointed hour. He reviewed the standard preflight data: weight and balance figures; the amount of fuel needed to get to Charlotte, North Carolina; the takeoff, climbing, and cruising speeds. A few seconds before 3:25 p.m., the tower cleared US Airways Flight 1549 for takeoff. Sully’s first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, was at the controls. They trade off, and it was his turn. Skiles hit the throttle. Sully called out the appropriate speeds. And at 3:25, they were aloft over the Bronx, headed out toward the Biggy Intersection, the navigational fix over New Jersey that steers them clear of Newark air traffic. From Biggy, they’d veer south over D.C. to North Carolina. The controller cleared them to climb to 15,000 feet. Sully acknowledged. The skies were clear and calm. For Sully, this was the last leg of a four-day workweek. It had all the makings of a milk run.

Sully saw the birds a second before they hit—at 3:27 p.m., a huge flock of them. His first impulse was to duck. He heard them connect—thump!*Then he smelled them. There was no mistaking it. Every pilot with enough flight hours has smelled burning birds. There’s usually not much more to a bird strike than that—maybe a little hiccup in the hum of the engines before the plane keeps on climbing. But this was different. This time, the craft lurched, and then there was silence. Sully had probably experienced something like that long ago, as a trainee, when his instructor leaned over, shoved the throttle into idle to mimic the loss of engine power, and asked, “Okay,*now*what?” But this wasn’t a lesson. This was real engine failure—both engines. Sully was 3,200 feet in the air, without power, slowly falling to Earth with 150 passengers and four other crew members onboard. For the first time that day, the captain took control of the plane.

“My aircraft,” Sully said.

“Your aircraft,” said the first officer.

Pilots have rules even for falling, and Sully set about following them. He lowered the nose so the plane would glide, not drop quickly. He ordered the first officer to start into a three-page checklist of procedures for restarting both engines, even though he must have known that was hopeless. He radioed the controller to report the bird strike. “Ah, this is Cactus 1549, hit birds, we lost thrust in both engines. We’re turning back toward La Guardia.”

The controller ordered the La Guardia tower to stop all departures. “It’s 1549. Bird strike. He lost the thrust in the engines. He’s returning immediately.” It was 3:28.

Pilots are taught that if you need to ditch, you should land at the nearest practical airport. But Sully didn’t have time for that. He’d been out of power for a minute already; he’d now dropped well below 3,200 feet. The controller asked if Sully wanted to land on La Guardia’s Runway 13. Sully responded: “We’re unable. We may end up in the Hudson.” Teterboro wasn’t a possibility either. He could see the New Jersey airport out of his window and knew it was too far. The rules weren’t useful anymore. Sully had no playbook to consult, even if he’d wanted to. No pilot in modern jet aviation had ever pulled off a successful water landing. The simulators don’t even offer it as a scenario.

He turned the aircraft south from the Bronx to align himself with the river. The George Washington Bridge was straight ahead. Sully had to eyeball it the same way he’d eyeballed Teterboro, deciding if he could clear it. He did, by just 900 feet. Then he had to calculate the projected glide path, and gin up a way to set the plane on the water at just the right angle, so the nose was up and neither one of the wings tipped. If the nose or a wingtip hit the water as he approached, the plane could flip, spin out, or snap in two.

It was 3:29. Sully saw a boat on the river. He wanted to be close to that boat, so passengers could be pulled from the wreckage. He was improvising. Without the use of his engines, he maneuvered the flaps just so to control his speed—enough to minimize impact, but not so much that the plane would drop like a 50-ton rock. And with 90 seconds left, he made his first communication to the passengers of Flight 1549.

“Brace for impact.”

But it wasn’t really his aircraft. It hadn’t been for years. When Chesley B. Sullenberger III was first starting out, 40 years and 19,663 flight hours ago, commercial-airline pilots were like gods. It was the age of Chuck Yeager and Pan Am, and the captain in uniform was a breed apart, on a par with Hollywood actors and professional athletes. The job was prestigious and well paid; kids wanted to visit the cockpit, to grow up to fly. And on a clear but frigid January Thursday, when Sully set his plane down in the middle of the Hudson River, becoming the first pilot ever to execute a controlled water landing in a modern commercial airliner without a single fatality, the age of the hero pilot was once again, for a brief moment, alive. Sully’s deification, which began almost instantly, moved from the Inauguration to the Super Bowl and continues next week, when the pilot is set to appear on*60 Minutes*and*David Letterman.

But the truth is, in the years since Sully began flying commercial jets, piloting has become anything but glamorous. Automation has taken much of the actual flying out of the job. The airlines’ business woes have led to longer hours and lower pay. Flying is now governed by enough rules and regulations to fill several encyclopedias. The people attracted to the profession today are different, too. Where the piloting ranks were once made up of former Air Force jocks, many of them combat veterans, they are now filled mainly with civilians for whom flying is less an adventure than a job. “Twenty-five years ago, we were a step below astronauts,” says one veteran pilot. “Now we’re a step above bus drivers. And the bus drivers have a better pension.”

From a passenger’s point of view, that’s mostly a good thing. Each year, hundreds of millions of people fly commercial in the U.S., and fatalities are almost always in the low double digits. In the past two years, there have been absolutely no deaths at all. Changes in the way pilots are recruited and trained are a key reason: In the vast majority of situations, airline-safety experts say, you want the company man, not the cowboy. But then there are the exceptions, the Miracles on the Hudson, the rare moments when it is following the rules, not subverting them, that becomes the riskier course of action. Pilots like Sully who can perform in such circumstances are a dying breed.

Sully has been in the business long enough to witness firsthand the domestication of the airline pilot. In the early days, pilots were largely uneducated farm boys or blue-collar kids who left home to become barnstormers. Some might never have spent a minute in flight school or read a flying manual. But as commercial air travel began rapidly expanding, the airlines embraced the image of the heroic captain, the distinguished man in uniform you can trust with your life. The industry paid top dollar for a new generation of service-academy-educated aviators, many of whom had been through Vietnam. This was Sully’s generation. By the seventies, as many as 80 percent of commercial-airline pilots had served in the military. “When Sully first got hired,” says Keith Hagy, the director of engineering and air safety for the Air Line Pilots Association, the pilots’ union, “he probably made a pile of money.”

The airlines liked military pilots, in part, because “the government had done all that work for them,” says Don Skiados, who has worked closely with pilots for 40 years as a past chairman of the Aviation Accreditation Board International. The military had already tested the pilots’ psychological abilities, emotional traits, knowledge base, reaction time, and ability to make judgments. The only downside of the military background was that the pilots were, by necessity, trained to be risk-takers. “The approach to the mission is that this is war,” says Bob Ober, who worked as a pilot for Pan Am for 25 years and Delta for 10. “We gotta go. It doesn’t matter if certain things are inoperative, we’re gonna take some risks.”

Since that time, pilot culture has done almost a 180. The maverick pilot has given way to the professional—the captain who knows how to put aside his ego and not take unnecessary risks. The change began when the military started downsizing after Vietnam and its talent pool dried up. The pilots of the military made room for a generation of pilots largely educated in flight schools offering four-year degree programs. Candidates racked up flight hours on small commuter planes over Albuquerque and Toledo, not in fighter jets.

...continued...